If you’ve attended a major art show in the last 20 years, chances are you will have come across a striking couple who stand out even in the attention-seeking art world. Completely bald, made up like macaws, and dressed like surrealist pantomime dames, the duo sweep through openings, stealing the limelight with their extra-terrestrial looks and otherworldly frocks.
EVA & ADELE (they insist on the ampersand and capitals) might not actually be part of the exhibition in question, but it doesn’t matter. They are always on show. “Wherever we are is museum,” runs one of the Austro-German couple’s Denglish catchphrases. Another is “futuring,” a reference to their claim to have come from the future, having landed their “time machine” in Berlin just before the wall fell in 1989.
“We are an artwork,” says Adele in her high-pitched chirrup, when we meet in their eye-popping Berlin apartment-cum-studio, a pink and white amalgamation of four apartments in a chi-chi block in Charlottenburg. Adele is the smaller, more outwardly female of the pair, who are both, since the start of this year, legally women. Personal details are sketchy: All they admit to in the biography section of their Web site are their vital statistics, which they work hard to maintain, since their goal is to keep looking exactly the same. That’s why the animal-shaped biscuits on offer in their studio are sugar-free, and why the pair begin each morning with a gymnastics session. Being a living artwork is tough.
photo: EPA
Their ages are a secret, too: They come from the future, remember? But they are in good nick for what I’d estimate are their 50s. They have particularly lovely legs. And not only do they dress identically, they eat the same food, too. When we go to a Berlin restaurant later, Adele orders for both; when she opts for fizzy water, so must Eva. At home, Adele does the cooking, while, she says, “Eva does the washing. All our underwear and silk stockings must be washed by hand.”
Since they met and fell in love, they claim to have spent not one night apart. Nor, they insist, do they ever leave the house or receive guests without being fully made up. In their hallway sits a grainy black-and-white photo of Eva, in full garb, snapped by a speed camera. “It was sent by the traffic police,” Adele says. An Austrian hotelier we dine with later nods as the ladies recall how they would swim in full makeup when they were artists-in-residence at his five-star hotel, the Arlberg Hospiz, earlier in the year.
They don’t like being compared to Britain’s Gilbert and George, though. “We don’t just go and do a performance in a gallery and then stop being EVA & ADELE afterwards,” Adele says.
As for the British artist Grayson Perry, his transvestism is a “Schauspiel,” says Adele, meaning a performance. “People feel less threatened by him.”
In the UK, EVA & ADELE appeared as The Eggheads on Channel 4 TV’s Eurotrash. From 1997 to 2002, the pair contributed sketches featuring odd rituals, such as putting banana skins or fish on their heads.
“It was video art,” Eva says. “Video art but for 6 million viewers. No one really understood what we were doing. Even those paying us.”
The women claim they were asked to take over from the show’s host Antoine de Caunes.
“They begged us,” Adele says. “But it would have taken too much energy. We wanted to stay as artists. We would rather paint pictures. They made VERY big offers to us.”
Being on TV had its benefits, she adds.
“There have been times when we have been filling up our campervan at a petrol station in a rough area and getting hassle and then suddenly one lad will say, ‘Stop! They’re famous! I’ve seen them on TV!’ And they leave us alone.”
The day we meet, the duo are joined by a strait-laced couple from Frankfurt, who won a day with the artists in a raffle.
Hans works in the tax office and is curious about their affairs. What can they offset as a work-related expense, he asks.
Eva explains that the beauty of being a walking artwork is that everything that goes into it is a legitimate expense: “Nail varnish, lipstick, costumes ...”
Their clothes rails, one hidden behind a pink silk curtain printed with their own faces, are full of gaudy costumes. Getting ready, says Adele, is a three-hour process. Today, Eva is wearing a glittery blue bindi, aquamarine eye shadow and red lips, while Adele has opted for purple eye makeup. They are both wearing black bolero jackets, black pearl necklaces, baby pink dresses in chiffon, pale tights and white platform shoes.
A huge smile completes the look. “It’s part of the work,” Eva says. “But we never fake it. We’re never cheesy. If we don’t feel like smiling, we don’t go out.”
The black has a meaning: Both women are in mourning for close relatives who recently died. It also emerges that the dresses were their wedding attire: Earlier this year, they finally got married after Eva won a grueling three-year fight to have her sex changed on the register of births.
As a man and woman, the two could have gotten married any time in their 22-year relationship. But it was important for them to be able to marry as two women. Civil partnerships have been legal in Germany since 2001, but it was only this year, after a constitutional court ruling, that transsexuals could apply to have their sex legally changed without changing their body. Eva, who has a deep voice and broad shoulders, went before a judge to argue that, despite her body being male, her soul was not. When the judge, having read numerous psychiatric and psychological reports, agreed, Eva’s birth certificate was reissued with her sex as female.
“I’m neither a man nor a woman,” she explains. “Neither is Adele. We’ve invented our own sex.”
Eva will not reveal her birth name, nor where she is from. When I say she sounds very Austrian, she will only say: “We come from the future, but I learned German in Vienna.”
She explains how she deliberately chose the name Eva when she started out as an artist: “It has a deep meaning because in our Christian mythology Eve, the first woman, was made from the ribs of Adam, the first man. Now it is my legal name and I am very proud of it.”
Gender has always been a key part of their work and look. When they met (which they tell me was “dancing on a football pitch in Italy,” though I’ve read other reports), both were producing art that played with gender. It was when they decided to become a living artwork that they created their hermaphrodite image.
“Because we have female forenames,” Eva says, “the female dominates. We wear ultra-feminine clothing. Never trousers, always heels. That’s very important. But we have these phallic shaved heads.”
Though the pair are art, they are also artists. Stacked in their studio are dozens of self-portraits. Called the MEDIAPLASTIC series, they are based on pictures of themselves from newspapers. A big painting sells for 35,000 euros (US$48,000), says Eva, “but when you consider how expensive it is to make our art, plus our outfits, our traveling and paying our assistants, we just break even really.”
Their breakthrough came in 1991 at Berlin’s Martin Gropius Bau museum: Hijacking the first east-west exhibition in the German capital after reunification, EVA & ADELE staged their own “marriage.” Pictures of the performance went around the world, and the duo have been famous in the art world ever since. There are those, however, who resent their scene-stealing, saying they’d turn up to the opening of an envelope.
“Wicked whispers,” snorts Eva, as we inspect Anschlussel (Connections), an exhibition at the Fruehsorge gallery that includes their drawings of everything from skulls to their dressing-up rotas; it transfers to London next year.
Is it annoying that people don’t realize you produce art as well as embody it?
“All superficiality annoys us,” Adele says. “All contemporary artists are in the same boat as us — not being taken seriously initially. But with us, the freedom we have with sex irritates people. It annoys them so we have to draw even better, put more energy into our work than ordinary artists.”
Certainly, it is as themselves that EVA & ADELE have had the most impact. They excitedly tell me that a religious textbook used in German schools has a whole page devoted to them. “A whole page! Can you imagine it?” gasps Adele, clasping her tiny hands together. The exercise apparently asks students to consider different ways of leading a good life.
Eva says that when they recently exhibited in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, someone told her the pair had special meaning for the people of that country. “After 50 years of the Soviet Union,” Eva says, “we are a symbol for freedom.”
EVA & ADELE point out how much the world has changed since their first “wedding” in 1991.
“You’ve got to remember that for most of the 20th century it was hard for women to be recognized as artists,” Eva says. “It was only really in the 1990s that they started to be taken seriously. It was the only era we could have landed our time machine in.”
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